Overcoming Targeting Challenges

There are times when Facebook advertisers lose customers and can’t spend their daily budgets because their own campaigns compete against each other, even before reaching the online auction. This is due to duplicate targeting. You can prevent the problem by designing your campaigns carefully with the instructions in this article.

Here’s an example: We are running two Facebook campaigns for a web store called Kalle’s Comfort Shoes (name changed). The first campaign, called “WCA, main page visitors,” is targeted at web store visitors in Germany and has a daily budget of €1,200. The second campaign, called “Lookalike, seed audience: Checkout page WCA,” is targeted at a lookalike audience in Germany and has a €1,000 daily budget. Because both campaigns target people in Germany, there is a possibility of overlapping audiences. Thus, you could end up competing against yourself (see the picture “Original Version”)!

Receiving enough impressions and conversions while spending the daily budgets becomes challenging because using a lookalike audience can steal impressions from a campaign using WCA targeting. In this example, the campaign targeted at a lookalike audience spends about €1,000 per day, while the campaign using WCA targeting ends up spending only €100 per day. Both campaigns utilize oCPM bidding, which causes problems for the WCA campaign because it can’t achieve the minimum amount of daily conversions.

There is a simple solution to this problem: dedupe—or, in plainer terms, stop targeting the same people twice. In the example above, the duplicate targets problem was fixed by excluding the WCA targets from the campaign targeting a lookalike audience (see the picture “Excluded Version”). With no targeting overlap amongst the two campaigns, it’s easier to have a stable spend and to get the minimum conversions for the oCPM algorithm.

Two days after removing the overlapping targeting, the campaign using WCA targeting started to spend about €600 per day and the campaign targeting a lookalike audience began spending €500 per day. Now it’s easier to analyze and control the performance because the campaigns spend in a more predictable and stable way.

Smartly.io makes it easy to exclude overlapping targeting under the Audience tab. You can exclude WCAs, custom audiences, lookalikes, interests, behaviors, user clusters, partner categories, and connections. Feel free to comment on the post and ask questions. We are here to help!